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The relationship between Christianity and Judaism is unlike any other interfaith encounter, because it is a relationship between parent and child. Christianity was born from within Judaism: Jesus was a Jew, the first disciples were Jews, the earliest Church worshipped in the Temple, and the Scriptures of Israel are Christianity's own Old Testament. Yet this closest of kinships became the site of the longest and bitterest hostility, as Christian "teaching of contempt" helped prepare the soil in which European antisemitism — and ultimately the Holocaust — could grow. This lesson examines the shared scriptural heritage, the "parting of the ways," the doctrine of supersessionism and its critique, the seismic impact of the Holocaust on Christian theology, the teaching of Nostra Aetate on the Jewish people, the Jewish statement Dabru Emet, and the live debate over whether God's covenant with Israel continues alongside the new covenant in Christ.
Christianity and Judaism share more theological and textual common ground than any other pair of world religions — which makes their disagreements unusually intimate and unusually sharp.
The Jewish Tanakh — an acronym for Torah (law), Nevi'im (prophets) and Ketuvim (writings) — is substantially the same body of text as the Christian Old Testament, though ordered differently and (in some Christian canons) supplemented by the deuterocanonical books. The two communities, however, read these shared Scriptures very differently. Christians read the Old Testament christologically, as promise pointing forward to fulfilment in Christ; Jews read the Tanakh as the enduring covenant charter of God's life with Israel, interpreted through the rabbinic tradition of Mishnah and Talmud. The shared text therefore both unites and divides: it means the two faiths worship the same God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and hold many of the same narratives, commandments and hopes in common, while reading the very same words toward different ends.
The difference of reading is not a minor matter of emphasis but goes to the heart of each tradition's self-understanding. Even the name of the shared text is contested: "Old Testament" is itself a Christian description, implying a "New" that completes and surpasses it, and many in dialogue now prefer the neutral "Hebrew Bible" precisely to avoid that supersessionist overtone. The ordering differs too — the Tanakh ends with Chronicles and the hope of return to Jerusalem, whereas the Christian Old Testament ends with the prophets (Malachi) looking forward, conveniently setting up the Gospels. A shared verse can carry opposite weight: Isaiah 53's "suffering servant" is read by Christians as a prophecy of Christ's atoning death and by most Jewish interpreters as a portrait of suffering Israel itself. These examples show why the shared Scripture is the site of the deepest disagreement as well as the firmest common ground — the two faiths are, in a real sense, rival interpreters of the same library.
| Concept | Judaism | Christianity |
|---|---|---|
| Monotheism | The Shema: "Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord alone" (Deuteronomy 6:4) | One God, understood as Trinity — Father, Son, Holy Spirit |
| Covenant | God's enduring covenant with Abraham and Israel | New covenant in Christ; the standing of the old covenant is debated |
| Torah and ethics | The 613 mitzvot as the path of faithfulness | The moral law affirmed; the ceremonial law debated from the first |
| Messianic hope | The Messiah is still awaited | Jesus is the Messiah; his return is awaited |
| Creation | God created all things; humans bear the divine image | The same affirmation |
| Eschatology | The age to come; resurrection of the dead (in much of the tradition) | The Kingdom of God; resurrection; final judgement |
Key term: Shema — the central declaration of Jewish faith, "Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord alone" (Deuteronomy 6:4), affirming the absolute oneness of God. It is the touchstone of Jewish monotheism and the point at which the Christian doctrine of the Trinity becomes hardest for Judaism to accept.
Christianity and Judaism did not separate cleanly or quickly. For decades the followers of Jesus were a movement within Second Temple Judaism, one among several (alongside Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes and others). The "parting of the ways" was a gradual and contested process, driven by several pressures: the admission of Gentiles without requiring full observance of the Torah (the issue at the Council of Jerusalem, Acts 15); the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, which reshaped both communities; the rise of the rabbinic movement; and the increasingly sharp polemic visible already in the New Testament. By the second century, "Christianity" and "Judaism" were recognisably distinct religions. The tragedy is that, as the younger religion defined itself over against its parent, it increasingly cast Judaism not as a living faith but as a superseded relic — a move with catastrophic long-term consequences.
A recurring difficulty in reading the relationship is that some of the sharpest anti-Jewish-sounding language is internal to first-century Jewish debate. When the Gospel of John speaks critically of "the Jews," or when Matthew records the crowd's cry "His blood be on us and on our children" (Matthew 27:25), these texts were composed within a Jewish or Jewish-Christian milieu, as the polemic of one Jewish group against others — not yet as Gentile Christianity's verdict on an alien people. The disaster came later, when a now-Gentile Church read these intra-Jewish disputes as timeless condemnations of "the Jews" as such. Nostra Aetate §4 and modern scholarship both stress this point: the deicide charge — that the Jewish people collectively and perpetually bear guilt for the death of Christ — is a misreading that turned the family quarrel recorded in the New Testament into a charter for persecution. Recognising the difference between a first-century inner-Jewish polemic and a later anti-Jewish ideology is essential to handling this topic responsibly, and examiners reward candidates who avoid simply repeating "the New Testament is antisemitic."
A major development in twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship — the "Third Quest" for the historical Jesus, associated with scholars such as Geza Vermes and E. P. Sanders — has been the firm recovery of Jesus the Jew. Jesus kept Torah, debated like a rabbi, taught in the idiom of the Pharisees more often than against them, and proclaimed the God of Israel; his message is unintelligible apart from Jewish hope for the Kingdom of God. Strikingly, Jewish scholars have increasingly been willing to reclaim Jesus as a Jewish teacher of his time, even while rejecting the Church's claims about him. This scholarly convergence matters theologically: it makes supersessionism harder to sustain, since a Church that despises Judaism despises the very world that formed its Lord. It also supplies common ground for dialogue, the shared recognition that the Jesus of history belongs, as a historical figure, to the story of Israel.
Supersessionism is the traditional Christian view that the Church has replaced — superseded — Israel as the people of God. On this account, when (it was alleged) the Jewish people rejected Jesus as Messiah, God transferred the covenant promises from Israel to the Church, the "new Israel," rendering the old covenant obsolete.
Key term: Supersessionism (replacement theology) — the doctrine that the Church has superseded Israel as the people of God, so that the covenant with the Jewish people has been annulled or fulfilled-and-replaced by the new covenant in Christ.
R. Kendall Soulen, in The God of Israel and Christian Theology (1996), influentially distinguished three forms, and the distinction is examinable because the three are criticised differently.
| Type | Description |
|---|---|
| Punitive | God has rejected the Jews as punishment for rejecting Christ; the covenant is annulled. The harshest form, and the engine of the "teaching of contempt." |
| Economic | Israel's role in salvation history was temporary — a preparatory stage now fulfilled and completed in Christ and the Church. Less hostile, but still treats Judaism as obsolete. |
| Structural | The very narrative shape of standard Christian theology (creation–fall–redemption in Christ) sidelines Israel, reading the Hebrew Scriptures merely as a prelude. A subtler, often unnoticed form built into how the story is told. |
The value of Soulen's typology is that it shows supersessionism is not only a crude claim that "God hates the Jews" but can persist structurally even among Christians who would indignantly reject the punitive form — which is why critics regard it as so pervasive.
It is important for accuracy that the New Testament itself is not univocal about Israel, and a strong answer resists flattening it. On one side stand texts that support an enduring place for the Jewish people: Paul's olive tree and his "by no means!" in Romans 9–11 are the clearest, but Jesus' own affirmation that he came "not to abolish but to fulfil" the law and the prophets (Matthew 5:17) points the same way. On the other side stand texts more easily read in a supersessionist direction: the Letter to the Hebrews speaks of the first covenant as "obsolete" and "growing old" and "ready to vanish away" (Hebrews 8:13), and contrasts the "shadow" of the old worship with the "reality" in Christ. The Gospel of John's polemical use of "the Jews" has, as noted, been read disastrously. So Christian theology faces a genuine internal tension: its own canon contains both the resources for a robust anti-supersessionism (Paul) and texts that, read in isolation, encouraged the teaching of contempt (Hebrews, John). The decisive interpretive question is which texts are allowed to govern the reading of the others. Post-Holocaust theology has largely insisted that Romans 9–11, with its explicit denial that God has rejected Israel, must be the controlling lens — but the very fact that this is a choice shows that the charge of supersessionism cannot be settled by proof-texting alone.
Supersessionism has been subjected to a threefold critique, decisively sharpened by the Holocaust.
It helps to see how abstract supersessionist doctrine became concrete persecution, since the moral weight of the topic depends on it. From late antiquity onward, the "teaching of contempt" hardened into law and custom: the blood-libel myth (the slander that Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes) emerged in medieval England; the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) required Jews to wear distinguishing marks on their clothing; Jews were expelled from England (1290), France (repeatedly) and Spain (1492); they were confined to ghettoes and barred from many trades; and waves of pogroms accompanied the Crusades and recurred across Christian Europe for centuries. None of this is to say that Christian theology intended genocide, or that the Holocaust was a Christian project — it was the work of a racial, neo-pagan Nazi ideology that was itself often hostile to Christianity. But the centuries in which the Church had taught that the Jews were a cursed, Christ-killing people left European culture primed to see Jews as alien and dangerous. Most post-Holocaust theologians therefore speak of Christian complicity or preparation rather than direct causation — a careful distinction that strong answers preserve.
The behaviour of the churches during the Third Reich is itself instructive for evaluation. The record is mixed and largely shameful. Many German Christians acquiesced; the so-called "German Christians" movement actively sought to Nazify the Church and purge it of "Jewish" elements. Against them, the Confessing Church and the Barmen Declaration (1934), drafted largely by Karl Barth, resisted the subordination of the Church to Nazi ideology — though Barmen's primary concern was the Church's freedom, and it did not, in 1934, speak clearly for the Jews as such. A minority, including Dietrich Bonhoeffer (executed 1945), came to active resistance and paid with their lives. This history feeds directly into post-war theology: the question "how could this happen in a Christian civilisation?" became unavoidable, and the answer — that supersessionist contempt had done its slow work — drove the repentance that produced Nostra Aetate and its Protestant equivalents.
The Shoah — the systematic murder of roughly six million Jews by Nazi Germany during the Second World War — forced a profound reckoning in Christian theology and reshaped the Christian-Jewish relationship more than any other event.
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